It's starting to look like the end of an era for Ubuntu users as Canonical mull the creation of an ISO that won't fit onto a CDR. The question is, does it matter? Canonical owes at least part of its success with Ubuntu Linux to the unique way that it has been distributed. From the start it has been available as a downloadable ISO image and a free CD, posted at no cost to the user. This was great news for people who wanted to install Linux but did not have the luxury of a decent Internet connection. In a sense, installing via a CDR image has always been like a kind of cache, in that you're moving part of the content that you need onto permanent storage rather than pulling it through the network connection

I don't have experience with Ubuntu directly, but it's likely this is nothing to do with things getting bigger over time. It's never been possible to fit all the things on a CD-sized image that people actually want in a distro; this was a problem for Mandrake/Mandriva and MEPIS and SUSE back before Ubuntu even *existed*. Fitting a distro into 700MB has always been a trade-off, and distros have been considering moving to larger sized images for many years.

I can speak to Fedora from knowledge, and we've *decreased* the size of a live image with a given set of software in it over time, not increased it. But 700MB is still not really enough to fit in everything that everyone wants.

Even on a bluray it would be impossible to stick everything people might possibly want.

Let's say I'm a gamer. For perfect OOB experience, I'd like my OS to come with the latest games and video drivers, so that I don't have to buy or download them separately. Should Windows include unactivated copies of Skyrim, Battlefield 3, or whatever else is trendy at the moment ? Should a new release of Windows come out each time a new game or Nvidia driver is out ? If I'm into photo editing, should Windows come with Photoshop ?

CD or DVD, there is always a line to draw. In my opinion, OSs should ship with what is necessary to manage hardware and run most software. Everything else is a nice extra, which is here to demonstrate the capabilities of the OS and satisfy needs shared by more than 90% of users, but must not go in the way of the main purpose.